This invention relates generally to software definable antennas capable of functioning across a wide range of frequency ranges and environmental conditions.
That there is a need for a software defined antenna system to pair with the growth in software based radios is well known across both government and industry. Efforts have been started through both public agencies such as DARPA as well as private, corporate entities. In order to gain the full benefit of these novel radios, flexible antenna hardware is urgently in need.
It is desirable to provide geometrically flexible antenna hardware capable of functioning efficiently across a broad range of frequencies, signal types, and environmental conditions.
An optimal solution to the problem of building communications hardware that is functional across a wide bandwidth, with variable power transmit and receive and capable of functioning in degraded or cluttered environments, is a maximally adaptive radio system. The prior art has embarked upon a quest to engineer this very approach but while it has succeeded in building a software defined (thus highly adaptive) radio, it has failed to generate an antenna system which would allow the software radio to function to its full potential. Specifically, the prior art still utilizes such standard hardware as patch antennas and as such, the prior art forms are still unable to gain full usage from these novel software defined radio systems. Additionally, the majority of the explorations into the field of reconfigurable antennas have been in one or two forms: either a short antenna which can be connected to a longer antenna section via a switch (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,195,065 B1) or narrow bandwidth antennas at the lower end of the size and power scale, leaving unaddressed the needs of larger, higher power applications.
The other background from which the motivation for this invention is drawn is nonemissive display technology as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,026 and utilized in several electronic book systems. These displays utilize electrically charged ink (with opposite charges and different colors) suspended in spheres of fluid. When an electrode beneath the sphere becomes positively or negatively charged it draws a specific color of ink to the bottom of the sphere while forcing the other color to the top. In this way each sphere becomes a pixel on the display controlled by the matrix of electrodes set beneath the spheres. While these displays are quite effective at visible wavelengths they are all completely ineffective at interfering with longer wavelength radio frequencies as used in communications antennas.